Part 26 (2/2)

”Walk along the docks to Polk Street and then south until you find a car--I think it turns in at Pacific Avenue. The conductor will tell you where to transfer--”

”Are there no cabs?”

”There are hacks and coupes at the livery-stables, if you care to expend ten or fifteen dollars for being less comfortable than in the cars.

Remember our hills are little off the perpendicular.”

She did not see fit to inform him that his business would not take him into the hilly district, and watched him wend his way along the noisy, dirty, evil-smelling docks with some satisfaction. Then she climbed the steep hill to her house, over the crest. There were many cottages on this side of Russian Hill and one or two fine residences, but beyond one cable-car line little or nothing had been done to make life easy for the inhabitants. It was a bit of pioneer San Francisco. One day, no doubt, there would be a boulevard at its foot, the rough inhospitable cliff would be terraced, and set with the country-like villas of people that appreciated the beauties of the bay and Tamalpais, but at present a carriage could not mount it, and it made no appeal to the luxurious.

An elderly couple lived in the ”Belmont House” and did all that was necessary in the present stage of Isabel's fortunes. She found the woman house-cleaning and the old man weeding among the abundant crysanthemums and asters in the half acre which still surrounded the old mansion. She gave her orders and started for the home of her sister. A belated trade-wind was screaming through the city driving the dust before it.

Isabel looked down at the towers and the domes, the steeples and walls of the great modern buildings, the low city built in the days when San Franciscans still feared earthquakes, all looming through the torn brown veil like the mirage of a city infinitely distant. But San Francisco was rarely more beautiful than in a dust-storm, which recombined her outlines and the patchwork of her crowded generations into something like harmony. She looked dreaming, proud, detached, an houri veiled to allure, to inspire a new race of poets. Gwynne holding his hat on his head with both hands, in the valley, cursed the climate, but Isabel picking her way down the crazy old staircase, although in anything but a poetical mood, paused a moment with that sudden outrush and uplift that was the only pa.s.sion she had ever known. Such moments were not frequent and brought with them a sense of impersonality, as if she were but the vehicle of aspiring pa.s.sionate souls long gone from their own clay, that rushed back through familiar conduits like volcanic fires, eager for the arch of the visible world.

But ancestral rights had short shrift this morning. Isabel's spirit was a very caldron. She not only still raged at the fact that for a few seconds she had been as helpless in the grip of mere brute strength as any peasant woman, but she was keenly disappointed that Gwynne had not understood her. That he might have understood her too well, his whole s.e.x precipitating itself upon the new enemy, she would not admit for a moment; women, with a sort of dishonest mental confusion, invariably subst.i.tuting the word misunderstood for failure to accept their own point of view. Above all, was she furious with herself. Instead of annihilating him with the dignity of which she possessed an uncommon share, she had been surprised into behaving as if she were the crudest of mere human creatures.

Moreover, her arms still pained, and she knew that they were black and blue.

At the foot of the bluff she ran into a bas.e.m.e.nt doorway to pin on her veil more securely, and dismissed psychology as incompatible with trade-winds and dust. A block or two farther on she took a cable car which slipped rapidly down the western slope, across the narrow valley, then up another and steeper hill, all blooming with flowers in the narrow gardens. She alighted at a corner half-way to the summit, and walked back to one of those curious San Francisco ”Flat Houses” with three doors in a row. It was perched high above the sidewalk, for the street but a few years since was a gully, and the grading had deepened it. It was reached by some sixty winding but solid steps, and the little terrace, off at a right angle, was full of color.

As she had expected, Mrs. Paula was sitting in the bow-window of her bedroom, gazing at the pa.s.sers-by with a sort of idle eagerness. But so were a hundred others in sight, there being no idler creature than the American woman of small means, who neither belongs to clubs nor does her own work. The shallow philosophers harp upon the boredom of the idle rich whose every wish is gratified; but as a matter of fact the rich are seldom idle, and in highly organized societies are models of system and energy; whether misdirected or not, is beyond the question. It is the idle woman in a flat whose imagination riots along the highways of the great world, who keeps an avid eye for change of any sort, and finds a fict.i.tious existence in the sentimental, the immoral, and the society novel.

Paula, who lived in the top flat, ran down the two flights of stairs and opened the door for Isabel.

”Well! you are a stranger!” she exclaimed. ”I was wondering if your chickens had tuberculosis. Lots have in California. I read it in a Sunday newspaper.”

”My chickens are quite healthy. How are the children?”

”As well as can be expected in this dusty windy city where they have to stay in the house half the day.” Mrs. Stone's children were notoriously healthy, but she was of the stuff of which the modern martyr is made.

Isabel followed her up the stairs and into the large sunny front bedroom. The children being invisible and also inarticulate, were doubtless in the back yard. The room was vaguely untidy without being dirty. A basket of socks and stockings in various stages of repair stood on a table by the window, but pushed aside to accommodate the Sat.u.r.day society papers and a novel from the circulating library. An opera-cloak lay across a chair, flung there, no doubt, the night before, and on the floor close by was a pair of pink worn slippers very narrow at the toes but bulging backward like a toy boat. On the sofa was a freshly laundried pile of s.h.i.+rts with detached collars and cuffs, which Mrs.

Stone immediately began ostentatiously to snip along the frayed edges.

The room itself was full of suns.h.i.+ne, which gave it a cheerful air in spite of the faded Brussels carpet and the old-fas.h.i.+oned walnut furniture, a contribution from the house on Russian Hill. Mrs. Paula wore a vastly becoming wrapper of red nun's veiling trimmed with a yellowish lace that by no means looked as cheap as it was. She was pretty to excess, one of those little brown women that men admire and often trust. Had she been thin she would have been bird-like with her bright darting brown glance, but her cheeks, like her tightly laced little figure, were very round, and so crimson that they excited less suspicion than the more delicate and favorite pink. And the brilliant color suited her peasant style of prettiness, her full red lips, her bright crisp bronze hair. She had a fas.h.i.+on of absently sweeping the loose sleeves of her wrapper and ”artistic” house-gowns up to her shoulder and revealing a plump and charming arm; and the pointed toe of shoe or slipper was always visible. Her arts were lost on Isabel, who understood and despised her, but who regarded her as a sacred legacy from her mother; Mrs. Belmont had been devoted to the pretty child she had adopted just after burying three of her own, and who had waited on her hand and foot to the day of her death. Isabel was always conscious of putting on a curb the moment she entered her sister's presence, but thought it good discipline, and only spoke her mind when goaded beyond endurance.

”I tried to telephone,” she began, but was interrupted by a deep sigh.

”The telephone is cut off--we owe for three months. Hateful things!--they know we always pay some time or other.”

”If you are so badly off would it not be more economical to make the children's clothes--”

”Isabel! Much you know about children! One can buy ready-made things for just half.”

Isabel subsided, for she felt herself at a disadvantage before this experienced young matron; although she vaguely recalled that whenever she had presented the children with little frocks and sailor suits she had expended a considerable sum. But doubtless she had gone to the wrong shops. Mrs. Paula was one of those women that haunted the cheap shops and bargain-counters, and was always in debt.

”What a heavenly suit!” she exclaimed, her eyes roving covetously over Isabel's smart black costume. ”Paris, I suppose. Fancy being able to walk into a store and order a new dress whenever you feel like it. I have never done that in all my life--”

”It was for that I settled an income upon you before I left for Europe, but if it is not enough to buy a new frock occasionally--”

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